It’s like that itchy feeling you get when reading those ominous missives from the primary school about an outbreak of headlice. You haven’t even put down the letter and started to check your own sprogling’s hair – but the creepy, crawly sensation gets you anyway.

Aww, look at all the little spiderlings! Though I think jumping spiders are my favorite, I really love wolf spiders. I once caught one and kept her as a pet so I could watch her eat small grasshoppers. It was totally awesome. I ended up letting her go after a few weeks because I felt bad for keeping her locked up in my terrarium.

This reminds me, I recently re-discovered “Charlotte’s’ Web”, which is a story that seems atheist friendly. [spoilers ahead]

charlotte’s plan is based on humans being “gullible” and what do you know, the human’s first reaction to her web is that it is a miracle! a priest is briefly mentioned to have given a sermon about the meaning of the ‘Sign’, and in his sermon his message is ‘this sign means that we should always be watchful for signs’ [obviously vacuous, much?]. Then, near the end of the book, Charlotte is dying and I think the audience is meant to perceive injustice when her work is firmly attributed to the ‘supernatural’.

Quite. I mean, spiders have extensive cultural traditions, including sophisticated language and technology which make it fiendishly difficult to even make sense of the idea of innate psychological differences between the sexes, let alone identify them with reasonable confidence, don’t they?